Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages

by Jan M. Ziolkowski

Nota Bene explores a little-known juxtaposition of verbal text and musical notation in the Middle Ages. This particular intersection deserves attention from those interested in music, the reception of classical Latin literature, the history of education, and the development of punctuation. Between the late tenth century and the late twelfth century, the musical notation known as neumes was provided in dozens of manuscripts for, among other texts, a number of Horace's Odes as well as for sections of epics by Lucan, Statius, and Vergil. These materials constitute a paradoxical corpus of "classical poems in plainchant" that complicates our views of both how students learned Latin and what was being sung in an era most often associated with Gregorian chant. The book wrestles first with the literary-historical puzzle of why certain passages and not others were "neumed" and later with the ethnomusicological riddles of how, where, when, and by whom the passages were sung.

362 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2007

About the author

Jan Ziolkowski occupies the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professorship of Medieval Latin at Harvard University. From 2007 to 2020 he served as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. His scholarship has focused on the literature, especially in Latin, of the Middle Ages.
In the United States, he was elected a Member of the Medieval Academy of America in 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, and the American Philosophical Society in 2017. Abroad, he was appointed a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2006 and of the Academia Europaea in 2015. In 2015 he was awarded an Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class.
He held a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 1983, an American Council for Learned Societies Fellowship in 1986, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987–1988. In 2005-2006 he was a fellow-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Since becoming U.S. representative to the International Medieval Latin Committee in 1988, he has served as vice president from 1993 to 1999 and as president from 2000.